This article centers sociocultural and sociopolitical considerations of how young people understand, represent, and use data by presenting findings from a social design research study about how students in a public urban high school authored “data stories” using personal data they curated, collected, and visualized. The study contributes to theoretical understandings of critical data literacies by considering the experiences and practices of adolescents enrolled in a required media arts class as they produced data visualizations drawn from their everyday lives. Findings center on two aspects of critical data literacies youth developed—understanding themselves as people capable of using data for multiple purposes and understanding data as socially situated resources for meaning-making. This study foregrounds the importance of positioning youth as authors and architects of data, making central youth perspectives in understanding the role of data in young people’s digitally connected lives and highlighting the importance of expanding what “counts” as data. It also suggests the importance of creating infrastructure to support the development of culturally relevant data practices that highlight the social, cultural, and political uses of data and its racialized dimensions.

本文以社会设计和社会政治研究为中心，探讨年轻人如何理解，表示和使用数据，方法是提出一项关于社会设计研究的研究结果，这些研究涉及公立城市高中的学生如何使用他们策划，收集和收集的个人数据编写“数据故事”。可视化。这项研究通过考虑参加必修的媒体艺术课的青少年在从日常生活中获取数据可视化效果时的经验和做法，有助于他们对关键数据素养进行理论理解。研究结果集中在青年人开发的关键数据素养的两个方面：将自己理解为能够将数据用于多种目的的人，并将数据理解为具有社会意义的意义创造资源。这项研究强调了将青年定位为数据的作者和架构师的重要性，使青年中心观点可以理解数据在青年数字化生活中的作用，并强调扩大“计数”作为数据的重要性。它还暗示了创建基础架构以支持与文化相关的数据实践的发展的重要性，这些实践强调了数据及其种族化维度的社会，文化和政治用途。